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Mar 11, 2017

I found myself in a story and I'm already 6 chapters in because I have made myself write a chapter almost every day. All of them are over 1100 words. :)

Currently, I have a little problem. I wanted to know how sailors/captains knew when a storm might be coming when they still had decent weather. Oddly it just hit me that they would be out there and see the storm coming, but I feel like still using some of what I found since I spent so much time looking this up. I was originally looking for some kind of ...sailor's almanac, but I couldn't find one and that lead me to Weather Glass and Storm Glass. Pics below respectfully.

I've seen the last one, the storm glass, in tubes and I'm thinking of using this one since no one knows how long it has been in use, but it became associated with the captain of the USS Beagle. The ship that Darwin was on when it mapped the coastline of South America and had that 'breakthrough' on the Galapagos Islands. :) His name is FitzRoy. So you may find examples of storm glass with the name Fitzroy's Storm Glass. But he didn't make it, he popularized it in two ways. One, he wrote down what happen to it in certain conditions, like what you see above, but in pics, and then he started weather forecasting in Great Britain.

I'll double check those facts for you and confirm them in my next post.

Now, believe it or not, I just said or wrote the words 'sailor's almanac' so I just did a search and there it is. This is why some things just need to be said out loud, talked through or written down. :)

So I'll go use that and the storm glass together in my story.

Oh, yeah. It's a sea fairing yaoi story. It started out with the captain being a pirate, but I quickly got rid of that notion and he's just a captain but a freelance one with his own ship and crew.

It's not going to be a long story. If I get to 20 I'll be surprised, but it should be a fairly full story. I feel myself falling into some misconceptions, but I hope that I really don't in the end, or I change them in some way so I won't be crucified over them. :)

I'm saving the drafts over at Wattpad. I won't publish it until I'm done if not a chapter or two off from the end. Its name is 'Summer Seas'.

Mar 4, 2017

I was just writing a little story to go with a pic over on Tumblr a few days ago, as you know that I do. Well, I just kept writing as I realized that if I wanted to tell the whole story that I saw in the drawing, it couldn't be short. So when I got to a point that I thought was a good break point, I wrote, "Come back for part 2" like I did with "New Toy".

But instead of just leaving it at that, I copied what I had written over to Wattpad and added on until I felt like it was a real chapter, and then came back the next day to write chapter two. I even sat down on day one and hunted down clip art or pics to make a cover. Even though I have gotten to the end of chapter two and I'm going to try and write chapter 3 tonight, none of it is published yet. They are hanging out in the draft folder until I'm done.

If you have followed me for a while, years really, you would know that I like to post completed stories. I've been and is still being bitten by finding stories, getting into them, and then finding that they haven't been updated for months if not over a year, or this one was updated last week, but upon my arrival, they have decided to stop. So I post completed stories so no one can feel that way about my stories.

As for the story "New Toy" I don't think it will have more than 4 parts. 5 at the most just because I'm not sure yet as to where I will stop it. At first, I was thinking it would happen once they both left the office, but I may think of a more interesting ending and that may need a whole part for itself. 😊

Now, the new story. Yeah, I thought I was done with it too. But I didn't tell you the name. It's called "Summer Seas". I didn't even realize that I was writing one of those stories until I was at the end of chapter two. Very odd feeling. Yeah, I'm not telling you what kind of story it is yet. It's so cliche it's embarrassing, but I think I'm going well at it so far. 😊

Now, as an odd tie-in, someone over at DA asked for an imaginative answer as to why guinea pigs are called sea pigs. 😆 I almost didn't do it. I looked up the real reason why and then my head was mixed up in this story that is rather close to the answer so I had to do it. And here it is. More of a teaser as to what I'm actually writing over at Wattpad. :) If you feel like 'playing along' you can follow my Tumblr and keep and eye out for the first part there. :)

Ok, Why are guinea pigs called sea pigs?

==

The guinea pigs as we know them now as cute fuzz balls that kids and some adults are attached to as pets didn't always have such an easy life to look forward to. In fact, distant branches of their species are still used for what they were made for. Yes made for. Maze was not the only example of humans bending nature and creating something they needed. From centuries of breeding a rodent that was once commonly found in the mountainous region of Peru, they now had a dependent source of meat that didn't take up too much space, survived the climate, tasted very well when cooked and provided small pelts that were collected to make larger garments.Every home had a small hut that was sometimes attached to the house, and sometimes not, that sheltered anywhere from ten to twenty-five of these creatures at a time if not more. They never needed help mating and each birth consistently resulted in the birth of at least three new young ones every four months. So it wasn't uncommon to find herds of them residing in neighboring yards.

Over time this became a problem that individual villages dealt with in their way but soon found the same answer. Trade. Quivi, as they were known and sold as, slowly made their way down the trade route and out of the mountains to coastal towns and villages where they were sold to fishermen who lived on their ships and ate at sea for days at a time before having enough of what they were fishing for before coming back in to shore. Some of the tribes that didn't live in the mountain called the animal mountain stake in their own language.

As the years went by, some children would be given the task of cleaning the Quivi in the surf before their mother would kill and cook it for dinner for those living on land. Around this time, it was discovered that they could swim and got the nickname swimming fur. The children had races where they would 'play with their food' before it actually became lunch or dinner. A few fishermen were even known to keep their swimming furs in the water the entire time they were at sea. They were held in nets and just floated there next to the boat. For some of the fishermen that caught smaller fish, this turned into an unforeseen benefit. The droppings from these creatures would bring some species of fish closer to feed.

More years passed by and now we have Spaniards dropping anchor and trading with some of these small seaside villages and towns. In one town where the relations was good, one captain was talking with another sea fairing man and the subject came up of what they ate on their long trips back to where to they came from. The captain recounted with a fair measure of unpleasantness the shortcomings of their diet aboard ship and how he wasn't in any rush to start his voyage back because of it. This is when he's told that he could take some swimming furs on board with him like he does when he goes deep sea fishing once a month.

The captain was skeptical but at hearing that they could have fresh meat on his trip back home, he asked more about this swimming fur creature. He then finds out that what he and his crew have been jokingly calling baby pigs because they were mostly served split roasted and tasting of pig, were these swimming furs his friend was telling him about. He was told that they wouldn't take up much space on his ship and that they breed quickly so he would have an ongoing supply once he had enough food for the creatures on long voyages and that they ate almost any grass and vegetable.

The captain thought it over and even went to see a merchant of these swimming furs with his friend as translator. The price was reasonable and he would even be given some pregnant ones free of charge this time to see how well it worked out for him. But next time he was warned that the price for those would be a little bit higher. The captain said that he would talk it over with his cook and first mate. If they agreed they would be back the next day. The seller agreed and promised to hold the pregnant ones for him.

Over a meal of the same swimming furs that he brought from the mainland, along with sides of boiled potatoes, roasted onions and fried bananas, he proposed this new idea. He wouldn't deny that it was a planned strategy on his part to help them see things his way. And it worked. The three of them met the captain's friend and together they went to the merchant. There, a few more details were discussed and hammered out before they returned to the ship carrying five cages that were double stacked on the inside with about forty swimming furs and a bag full of their preferred diet.

"No more swimming for you," the cabin boy said to one of the Quivi as he picked it up out the cage to give it to the cook.

"Do you want to rename it then Brian?" the cook asked the boy before he chopped the head off and turned it over on a rack to allow the blood to drain down the wall and out a hole on the side of the ship.

"Well, we are sea men, so... it's now a sea pig," he said before stopping to think about. "Yeah, sea pig," he said with a smile before he retrieved another and handed it to the cook.

"Sea pig," the cook said as he took it from the boy. "Not bad," he commented as he positioned the animal on the cutting down and brought down the cleaver, decapitating it also.

By the time the ship made port in one of its colonies in the Carribean, to take on fresh water, the whole crew was calling them sea pigs. It was a meat that was served sparingly and to much fanfare, but still, they found themselves having to leave two females and two males alive so they could repopulate their numbers along with the six young ones that were born on board. They were handed over to a local plantation owner who was given instructions on how they were to be cared for and the warning of how quickly they could reproduce. He was to raise them for the ship so they could resupply when they pulled into port since their journies weren't long enough for any young that were born on board to reach the age of slaughter.

Years passed and the sea pig lived up to its name on the island where that plantation became the only one to sell the animal to any captain willing to pay his price for fresh meat on board his ship. ==

I know that it's not as creative as some of the other answers the person got, but most of what I write has to have facts in there. 😅